Well, if we followed the recipe...should be cake. A demon-violence-free-zone cake.

Lorne ,'Why We Fight'


Buffistechnology 2: You Made Her So She Growls?  

Got a question about technology? Ask it here. Discussion of hardware, software, TiVos, multi-region DVDs, Windows, Macs, LINUX, hand-helds, iPods, anything tech related. Better than any helpdesk!


Gudanov - Jan 30, 2006 4:56:57 am PST #6907 of 10003
Coding and Sleeping

You can redo the boot sector with fdisk /mbr. (As long as you don't need a driver to see the boot volume).


tommyrot - Jan 30, 2006 5:03:17 am PST #6908 of 10003
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.

Will that work with fdisk, if fdisk doesn't know what a NTFS partition is?

The Zap guy sez:

ZAP writes the first 128 logical blocks of the drive with 00h pattern, starting at Cylinder 0, Head 0, Sector 1.
This will very quickly wipe the FAT and boot sector, often necessary since Dos's Fdisk struggles 'seeing' non-dos partition types


Gudanov - Jan 30, 2006 5:04:34 am PST #6909 of 10003
Coding and Sleeping

I've done it to wipe LILO off an XP drive and didn't have any problems.

You can also use the recover console on XP and do "fixmbr [Device]" ie. fixmbr /Device/HardDisk0


tommyrot - Jan 30, 2006 5:07:02 am PST #6910 of 10003
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.

OK, I'll give ol' fdisk a try first.

(fdisk makes me all sentimental....)


Jon B. - Jan 30, 2006 7:18:09 am PST #6911 of 10003
A turkey in every toilet -- only in America!

Tommy, before you blank the thing, you might want to think about backing up your Windows activation files.

This is a great link. Thanks DX!


meara - Jan 30, 2006 9:30:17 am PST #6912 of 10003

ARGH. I know my powerbook wants more RAM (I've only got 256) but freezing while trying to play a DVD? That's just sad. Especially when I'm stuck in an airport, where I have to PAY for wifi. And I burned Grey's Anatomy off my TiVo just for this (and was just sitting here going "this is awesome!" when it froze. And when I force-quit and tried agian, it froze again. And the third time)

If this were a windows machine, I'd think I was stuffed with spyware and viruses. What gives??


tommyrot - Jan 30, 2006 12:30:49 pm PST #6913 of 10003
Sir, it's not an offence to let your cat eat your bacon. Okay? And we don't arrest cats, I'm very sorry.

Recommendations for version control? Something simple for a simple project? Either free or not too expensive?

Our client uses CVS, with TortoiseCVS as a frontend. My boss found TortoiseCVS confusing (I've barely spent any time with it, so I really don't know....). This page [link] is devoted to how much MS Visual SourceSave sucks, and lists a number of alternatives.


SuziQ - Jan 30, 2006 3:00:57 pm PST #6914 of 10003
Back tattoos of the mother is that you are absolutely right - Ame

Any bay-area-ista's up on TIVO connectivity? I have had my TIVO working just fine for a year. We lost cable for a day and when it came back my TIVO and my cable box stopped talking to eachother. I have tried all kinds of things with no success.

I can offer dinner in exchange....


DCJensen - Jan 30, 2006 4:20:59 pm PST #6915 of 10003
All is well that ends in pizza.

I stopped by Office Depot on my interview trip today. They had blank CD-R media 50-pk spools, Memorex branded for $5.99. Sale goes until Saturday.


sumi - Jan 31, 2006 4:26:34 am PST #6916 of 10003
Art Crawl!!!

All my technology questions are kind of low-tech, but last night I went to turn on my computer and discovered that on/off button had become stuck -- it won't pop out. Ummm, is there some way to fix this?

Also, yesterday, a label became stuck in my vcr and I was able to get it out and play tapes fine and it will record in slp, but not in sp - this is the kind of thing that can't or isn't worth fixing, isn't it?